Raising of America Partnership Boulder County

BUILD 2.0 Awardee

Lafayette, CO

Sister Carmen Community Center
Centura Heath
Boulder County Public Health

ABOUT

Thriving children in healthy environments set the foundation for an equitable community. Yet the families of Lafayette, Colorado are lacking many of the fundamental economic and social supports necessary for raising healthy children in secure environments. To address these issues, this collaborative is fostering inclusion and engagement to create conditions for young children and their families to help them reach their full potential. This project supports a sustainable pathway for engaging families, encourages leadership and involvement, and creates a bridge between health care and community health—all with the intention of improving family-friendly policies and early childhood development.

Targeted Impact

The most exciting impact is the participation and leadership of non-traditional partners and community members, which demonstrate a new, holistic approach to the basic conditions which allow people to be healthy in Lafayette. Additional areas of impact include: family engagement, family-friendly workplace, and early care and education policy.

BUILD PRINCIPLES

BUILD and its communities apply bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven (BUILD) approaches to improve health in communities that are adversely affected by upstream factors.

Bold

Building capacity to change the power structure for Latino families to impact systems and policy—ultimately changing how partners operate together in Lafayette—is bold. This is the opportunity to go from input-gathering and basic engagement, to full family leadership, decision-making, and mobilization.

Upstream

There is an upstream relationship between early childhood development and the desired health outcomes of health equity and improved community mental health. This program aims to improve social-emotional development within supportive environments and maximizes the opportunity that well child visits, plus sick visits, in the first year alone provide to impact early childhood development and life-long mental health.

Integrated

Recognizing that organizations can do more to support families with young children, parent leaders from ELPASO, Sister Carmen Community Center, Boulder County Public Health, and Centura Health and Clinica, have come together with a shared vision of parent leader-driven success.

Local

Raising of America builds on three years of ELPASO efforts in Lafayette and collaboratively looks to place decision-making in the hands of parent leaders. Among family leaders and key partners, the Whatever It Takes Community Meeting is the point of intersection. The meeting and agenda are planned and initiated by parent leaders, with the support of the Community Organizer.

Data-Driven

Because healthcare has a significant number of touch points with families with young children, there is a unique opportunity to learn from data gathered during these interventions. The Workgroup identifies Lafayette data on families with young children, as well as social determinants of health. Data is pulled from hospital, obstetric, and family practice sources.